PS4 Pro upgrades of PS4 games take no effort, says Sony

According to Sony, developers make very little effort to enable enhancements like 1080p 60FPS or super-sampled graphics in old PS4 games on the new PlayStation 4 Pro.

One of the biggest selling points of Sony's new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Pro is that it's fully backward compatible with all existing PS4 games, and can even provide performance and graphical boosts for current PS4 titles with Forward Compatibility updates.

We had originally worried that these Forward Compatibility upgrades would possibly quite an involved process, but Sony says that it's incredibly easy and only takes "a fraction of a percent" of the original game's development efforts.

"The target was to make sure that support [for the PS4 Pro] could be done for a fraction of a percent of the overall effort," PS4 Pro architect Mark Cerny said in a recent interview with GamesIndustry Biz.

"And I do mean a fraction of a percent. I mean, I've run the math, and it's 0.2 or 0.3 percent for these projects -- some of them. So at that point, I think it's very natural for the development community to support the platform."

This is pretty impressive, and speaks volumes for the PlayStation 4 Pro. Some PS4 Pro upgraded games like The Last of Us: Remastered run at native 4K on the console, whereas Rise of the Tomb Raider is able to hit three different graphical and performance presets: 4K 30FPS, 1080p 60FPS, and 1080p 30FPS with higher visuals like shadows, graphics, and more.

Given these upgrades are apparently so easy to do, we don't think that developers and publishers will charge money for Forward Compatibility patches. I originally predicted that devs would charge for these patches, as this new trend will basically phase out the entire market of 4K remastered games, and I felt that developers could be doing too much work for free.

Now it appears that's all changed, and developers actually don't have to do much optimization or work to get their games working on PS4 Pro, even with at native 4K 30FPS.